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January 26, 2010

A few days ago, Tom Craver asked what, other than food, would I put on a list of basic life needs.

Here's my initial list of manufactured things I'd like to see everyone on earth have access to:

Clean water

Weatherproof and burglar-resistant housing

Light at night

The Web and voice communication

Mosquito nets with long-lasting insecticide

Optional birth control

Clean cookstoves and/or solar cookers

Vaccines

Many of these things are available today, at a cost where the world could afford to supply them to everyone... if we all got together and really tried. Some of these things are quite inexpensive, on a global scale. For example, the UN says that everyone could have clean water for $20 billion per year, which seems like a lot... but we spend somewhere around $20-$100 billion per year on bottled water.

As manufacturing gets less and less expensive (in large part, thanks to nanotechnology), it will be more and more possible for private individuals to make a world-class difference. According to The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, Buckminster Fuller said in the 1970s that the planet now has the ability to provide for everyone, but it would take 50 years for us to fully act on it. In another ten years, a basic web appliance (with display, or maybe full voice interface) might cost $10 instead of $100. Likewise for a water filter. Adequate lighting might cost $3 instead of $30.

I'm not talking charity, nor communism, but simply preferring to live in a world where a small expenditure of money can give the world a billion fewer "poor people" and a billion more productive, participating citizens.

Some important things that didn't make the list:

Clothing: Depends on individual taste; already available in most areas

Medical care: Can't be automated and manufactured (yet)

Food: Grown, not manufactured; should be produced locally

Education: Some comes with the Web; some requires major human resources

Sanitation: Probably more about education, water, and habits than manufactured stuff

Employment opportunities

Healthy social structures

Decent government (information can help keep governments accountable)

I'm just starting to study this stuff, so please suggest additional ideas and corrections.

December 15, 2009

A water treatment system that can provide thousands of gallons of sterile water from even the most diseased source... it's portable, suitable for home use, doubles as a 5-gallon jerry can... it exists today, and when manufactured in volume, can provide clean water for the billions who don't have it today, for only $20 billion.

The heart of the system is a filter with 15-nanometer pores. The smallest water-borne virus, polio, is 25 nanometers. Thus, no disease can get through, and no chemicals are needed to make the water completely sterile. (A similar approach is the LifeStraw, which uses a larger filter plus iodine. It's even less expensive, but Wikipedia says that it may not remove all organisms.)

Here's a TED talk where the inventor, Michael Pritchard, mixes up a thoroughly disgusting concoction, filters it, and then drinks it. Pritchard talks about the potential of the technology for disaster relief and explains how little it could cost to provide clean drinking water for everyone.

A friend of mine grew up in Venezuela, and when I would talk about nanotechnology, she would always answer with stories of conditions in developing nations, asking "What can technology do about that?" I'm glad to finally have an answer for her.

Although this isn't the first solution to be proposed for the problem of clean water, it may be enough less expensive, more effective, more independent of infrastructure, and easier to distribute and use... it may be the answer that finally inspires the world to solve the problem rather than just chipping away at it. I'll be donating and fundraising for it.

Of course, the number of papers published may always be correlated with the quality of the work. And nanotechnology is a broad collection of barely-connected fields, with no indication of which fields these authors are publishing in. But still... it surprised me to see the US so far down on a tech-related list.

(I'd include the table in this post, but Typepad seems not to allow linking to external images. My only way to show the image would be to copy the image to Typepad, which would be a copyright violation - an actual crime - instead of mere linking, which may be rude depending on how it's done, but as far as I know isn't illegal yet. Anyway, click on the link above to see the table.)

June 25, 2009

Molecular manufacturing will give us the ability to do planet-scale engineering. We may need it.

Polar ice is melting faster than expected, and permafrost is releasing methane. Science tells us that large-scale reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide may be necessary to avoid major, destructive, near-irreversible climate shifts.

According to a recent CNN news story on carbon capture technology, it may be possible to remove carbon dioxide economically with today's technology. A machine that costs as much as a car could remove the carbon emitted by 20 cars. The power required to remove and liquefy CO2 is 1/5 the power generated by burning coal to produce it.

Of course, removing CO2 is only part of the puzzle. There remains the question of what to do with it. There are several possible answers to that, and it remains to be seen which one is best.

I'm enough of a pessimist to think that this technology will not be adopted until it's too late for it to make much difference. Thus, instead of (for example) a 5% tax on cars to offset their carbon emissions, we'll need a massive crash program. Today's technology will just be a reminder that we don't use technology wisely.

When molecular manufacturing was proposed in the 1980's, there were many applications that could not be achieved by any other technology. As time goes on, some of those applications are being addressed by advances in other fields of technology... at least potentially. Understanding the uses, misuses, and non-uses of today's technologies gives us some clues about how molecular manufacturing may be used and abused.

March 11, 2009

Two days into my new/old job, and I hear from Mike that there's a nano video going viral. It's hosted, no surprise, by none other than Wired, which also published Bill Joy's anti-nano article in 2000. Nanotechnologists take note: Wired wants to destroy your funding.

I wish I thought that videos like this would raise public awareness of
the implications of molecular manufacturing. But I don't. This video is
not just about destructive nano - it is a destructive video about nano.

So what's wrong with the video? Like all good lies, it contains grains of truth. Here are a few of the half-truths:

"Because it takes so many of these microscopic machines to do large-scale work, self-replicating nanobots will be pretty common in laboratories."

It is true that it takes many small machines to do large-scale work. The lie is that these machines will be free-floating and self-replicating, rather than being fastened in place like the conveyor belts and drill presses in a factory.

"Rather than replicating using the rarest materials, program the nanobot to use the commonest."

It is true that molecular manufacturing will provide lots of design flexibility. The lie is that machines can simply be programmed to change their fundamental construction: it's like saying "program the tree to grow on gasoline." More accurate would be "Design a whole new nanobot from scratch, because nothing like it will exist."

The overall message of the movie is that molecular manufacturing is powerful enough to be extremely scary.

It is true that molecular manufacturing will be immensely powerful and easy to misuse. The lie is that grey goo is the biggest danger. Deliberate institutional misuse of the products will generate more perilous and more urgent threats, which will be more difficult to prepare for.

At least I can hope that, nine years after Bill Joy's article scared nano researchers into claiming that molecular manufacturing was impossible, the researchers will react a little more calmly and reasonably this time. CRN has been explaining the realities of grey goo for years, and I co-authored a paper, "Safe Exponential Manufacturing," with Eric Drexler in 2004 on the topic.

While this video may scare the uninformed, perhaps the actual discussion of molecular manufacturing will emerge stronger and more sensible than before. I welcome your suggestions and actions toward this goal.